Evil Gods and Reckless Saviours: Adaptation and Appropriation in Late Twentieth-Century Jesus Novels

Evil Gods and Reckless Saviours

Adaptation and Appropriation in Late Twentieth-Century Jesus Novels

Timo Eskola

Evil Gods and Reckless Saviours

Adaptation and Appropriation in Late Twentieth-Century Jesus Novels

Copyright © 2011 Timo Eskola. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-61097-118-8

isbn 13: 978-1-63087-594-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Eskola, Timo.

Evil gods and reckless saviours : adaptation and appropriation in late twentieth-century Jesus novels / Timo Eskola.

x + 338 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-118-8

1. Jesus Christ—In literature. 2. Comparative literature. 3. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. I. Title.

pr888 j4 e75 2011

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For my father, Markku Eskola

(1931–2010)

Preface

Theodore Ziolkowski opened his monograph Fictional Trans-figurations of Jesus by speaking about points at which innovation intersects convention. He referred to T. S. Eliot’s notion about a tension between Tradition and the Individual Talent. Any Jesus-novel concentrating on Jesus’ unique personality faces an intertextual relationship where the author’s imagination is both directed and restrained by the canonical figure. My personal interest in recent Jesus-novels grew from the observation that, in late twentieth-century novels and some of the books from the new decade, the weight has shifted to the Individual Talent. Even though the characters remain the same, the narratives have started to take a distance from the biblical story and also question it. As a scholar of both the New Testament and comparative literature I have had the opportunity to investigate this intertextual relationship. The present investigation suggests some explanations about the nature of the new adaptations.

I wrote the analysis when working as a New Testament teacher at the Theological Institute of Finland, and as a Privatdozent (adjunct professor) at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Theology. During my additional studies at the Faculty of Arts, I began to prepare a dissertation on the subject. My supervisors, Professors Hannu K. Riikonen, Heta Pyrhönen, and Kai Mikkonen have accorded me unfailing support whenever I needed it. Furthermore, Professors Linda Hutcheon, Suzanne Keen, and Irene Kacandes have read parts of the manuscript. I am very grateful for their suggestions and advice.

Several people have discussed the topic with me and I am grateful for all the help that I have received even though it is not possible to thank each person individually here. Special thanks are due to Dr. Privatdozent Markku Ihonen for his support. I am also grateful for the help and advice of Dr. Francisco Peña Fernández, an expert on Saramago, who kindly shared his views and discussed the observations and conclusions presented in his own investigation.

Furthermore, I want to express my special gratitude to Dr. Sydney Palmer for a highly professional work with the language revision. She has also given me precious advice on how to express myself in English and shown remarkable understanding for the problems a Finn faces when writing in a foreign language.

I thank the Theological Institute of Finland and its general secretary, Henrik Perret, for making this investigation possible. Warm thanks go also to our secretary, Mrs. Kirsi Sell, who has constantly assisted me over the years by acquiring literature and helping in practical matters. I also thank Wipf and Stock Publishers for accepting my monograph under their distinguished Pickwick imprint, and Christian Amondson for his kind assistance.

When writing these lines, I have warm memories of my father, the late Markku Eskola, and feel grateful gratitude to my mother Raija Eskola. Their love of literature gradually drew me into the world of novels and poetry. Even during the period of my father’s illness they followed the development of my investigation with great interest.

Timo Eskola

Helsinki, Finland

Introduction

The literary tradition of repeating, paraphrasing, and reinterpreting Gospel narratives is rich and colorful. Alice Birney in her bibliography The Literary Lives of Jesus presents over one thousand works where some kind of Jesus-character is playing a leading role. Birney’s list reaches only to the end of the 1980s. ¹ Since then, over the last twenty years, several new Jesus-novels have been published. The authors comprise Nobel Prize winners and other celebrities of the literary community. Over the years attitudes have changed, and many of these newer novels are no longer content with merely paraphrasing canonical ideas as many previous books were. Instead, they represent a new trend of inversive reading where simple rewriting has turned into strict revisioning and deconstructing previous structures and hierarchies in the source text.

1. Polarisation in Recent Jesus-Novels

As fiction, Jesus-novels are unique since they are inevitably related to the canonical Gospels. They can be read as independent novels, but their raison d’être is in the fact that Jesus and his disciples appear in the story in their original geographical and historical surroundings. Contemporary Jesus-novels are deliberate adaptations and, therefore, want to make a statement. Their message and meaning depends on their treatment of the canonical original. Moreover, the reading of these novels is tied with the reader’s knowledge of the New Testament. The dialogical process of reading is guided by Western Christian tradition where the stories of the Bible still belong to our cultural heritage.

For a reader, spectator, or listener, adaptation as adaptation is unavoidably a kind of intertextuality if the receiver is acquainted with the adapted text. It is an ongoing dialogical process, as Mikhail Bakhtin would have said, in which we compare the work we already know with the one we are experiencing.²

The authors of recent Jesus-novels make ample use of this and rely on the fact that the reader will simultaneously read their novel in the light of the canonical text. From this one can estimate the basic intertextual relationship between these books and the original Gospels. This is also a clue for understanding different kinds of polarisations between a given novel and its Biblical source text.

Adaptive Jesus-novels in general can be classified in several ways. Firstly, there are novels where the Jesus-character has been transferred to a new context. These are stories about a thirty-year-old man whose life and message differ greatly from the world of the Bible.³ Secondly, rewritten New Testaments describe events that take place at the time of the New Testament, and the main character is usually Jesus himself. Here, in particular, it is possible to consider the novel’s relation to the canonical Gospels. Traditional novels explicitly build on the New Testament and describe Jesus’ personality through images and art. These novels usually follow the canonical story quite faithfully. Over the last two decades, however, several critical Jesus-novels have been published. In these writings the traditional picture of Jesus has been turned inside out. The figure of the Nazarene has been described according to premises that actually contest the views of the canonical Gospels. Material for the present investigation will be selected from these inversive late twentieth-century novels.

Adaptation as such can mean rather simple paraphrasing or more intentional transforming of the original work. In certain cases, however, it turns into appropriation. It can be an interpretive act or even a hostile takeover. Contemporary Jesus-novels contain features from both of these approaches, up to direct deconstruction of biblical ideas and events.⁴ The inversive trend has actually been recognised in scholarship for a number of years. In 1976 Robert Detweiler traced several principles functioning in religious fiction as follows:

The theological trends I find functioning in recent fiction are four: the need to let language speak itself, the disappearance of the subject, the evocation of presence, and the shaping of alternate worlds. These are not only theological trends, of course; they are, for example, philosophically, psychologically, and linguistically determined as well.⁵

Detweiler’s ideas apparently derive from European poststructuralist philosophy, which has always been closely connected with literary criticism. Jesus-novels’ factual relation to poststructuralist approaches will be investigated more closely in the analysis. The novels often present alternate worlds in order to discuss or even question the original Gospel narratives. In these cases the relation between the text and canonical Gospels is clearly present, as the new stories are usually critical towards the New Testament. It is not difficult to find examples of ideological antitheses and intentional contradictions. For instance, when describing José Saramago’s general outline in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, David Frier pays attention to the recurring contradictory features appearing in the novel.

Many critics have already commented on major features of the novel, some of which are clearly departures from Christian tradition: the ambiguous role of the Devil figure; more daringly, the unambiguously negative portrayal of God as an authoritarian and bloodthirsty tyrant, who is interested only in the expansion of his kingdom, regardless of the human cost involved; the conflictive relationship between Jesus and God, which displaces completely the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity; the non-resurrection of Lazarus; the loving relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which becomes a sexual one on their very first encounter and which endures throughout Jesus’s adult life. . . .⁶

The new literary trend of questioning traditional Christian beliefs raises questions. How should the new adaptations and intertextual revisions be explained? What are the principles behind the intertextual strategy that dissolves structures and overturns traditional hierarchies? To approach such questions, I have chosen novels that give harsh critiques of traditional Christianity. The best example of these is Saramago’s abovementioned novel, O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (1991). Also Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son (1997) falls into this category, as does the popular Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown in a slightly different genre. There are other books that focus on questions of power and deconstruction. These novels include, for instance, Walter Jens’s Der Fall Judas (1975), Taylor Caldwell and Jess Stearn’s I, Judas (1977), Göran Tunström’s Ökenbrevet (1978; The Letter from the Wilderness, translated only partly)⁷, and C. K. Stead’s My Name Was Judas (2006). Finally, there are feminist novels that contest Christian patriarchy, such as Luise Rinser’s Mirjam (1983), Michèle Roberts’ Wild Girl (1984), Regina Berlinghof’s Mirjam (1995), Marianne Fredriksson’s According to Mary (Swedish original, Enligt Maria Magdalena, 1997), and Ki Longfellow’s The Secret Magdalene (2005).

Since an effective investigation must focus on only a few main examples selected from a more extensive group, I have chosen Saramago, Mailer, Tunström, Roberts, and Fredriksson for this purpose. Saramago’s and Mailer’s novels are perfect for the aims of this analysis because, as new gospels, they have a direct relationship with the New Testament. Furthermore, they are distinctively ideological and have a strict intertextual strategy. These novels openly rewrite the canonical Gospels. Roberts and Fredriksson provide another view since they have written feminist gospels and make ample use of Gnostic writings. Tunström, in turn, exploits the Dead Sea Scrolls and, in addition to using the New Testament, discusses the ideology of the Qumran sect. Through this variety, the selected novels represent different approaches to intertexual rewriting. Other Jesus-novels are then compared with these more extensive analyses and commented on during the investigation.

Jesus-novels are historical novels by definition. The investigated novels are not identical, however, since some of them pointedly propose a new gospel. There are some differences between the gospel genre proper and more general Jesus-novels. Saramago calls his work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and Mailer uses the title The Gospel According to the Son. They both use a tremendous amount of canonical material. Persons, events, and even many of the stories are the same as in the Bible. Saramago does expand Jesus’ stay in the wilderness with the Devil, but even here the point of departure is the story of Jesus’ temptation. Fredriksson’s According to Mary begins with the biblical expression, but the focus shifts onto Mary’s character.⁸ Other novels about Mary Magdalene are more or less Jesus-novels, and Judas-novels belong to the same category. Their focalisation is distanced from that of the canonical Gospels. The point is in expanding the source and making one of Jesus’ followers the leading character. Mary Magdalene and Judas appear to be perfect candidates for this.

Furthermore, authors often comment that the original canonical Gospel from which they draw is somewhat defective. Saramago opens his book by quoting Luke (1:1–4): Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, . . . it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus . . . What follows is Saramago’s version of the story, of which he has perfect understanding even though it may disagree somewhat with the canonical text.⁹

Corrective motivation is apparent in many Jesus-novels. Mailer, for instance, deliberately confronts the canonical writers:

While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men.¹⁰

The question about the narrator is essential as well. Mailer’s novel is a gospel, but it is told by the risen Jesus himself. He is the narrator who wishes to give his own account. And in doing this he naturally hopes to remain closer to the truth than his apostolic collaborators.¹¹ This is a bold choice and makes a statement that raises several questions concerning the consistency of Mailer’s narrative and the trustworthiness of the narrator’s message.¹² Jesus is the narrator also in Tunström’s Letter from the Wilderness, but here the setting is different from Mailer’s. The novel is a Bildungsroman and, therefore, the questions the narrator deals with are rather more personal and psychological than theological.

Roberts’ Wild Girl is Mary Magdalene’s account. The story begins with an introduction: here begins the book of the testimony of Mary Magdalene. She who writes it does so at the command of the Saviour himself and of Mary his blessed mother. Roberts emphasises that everything Mary sets down is the truth.¹³ Fredriksson follows Roberts’s line. Depending on the support of other women in her community, Mary submits her own testimony. Her message contradicts the theology of the apostles. Mary meets all of the apostles during her lifetime and also after Easter, but a male religion such as Paul’s does not suit her or her memories: But she could not make Paul’s vision fit in with the young man she had loved. Therefore, Fredriksson makes Mary’s friend Leonidas state: her writings will still be here when the bickering between the various Christian sects has long been forgotten.¹⁴

Tunström has written an apocryphal gospel that informs the reader about Jesus’ early years. Jesus’ education at the Qumran monastery remains superficial, however, and the novel describes his journey from one fellowship to another, pondering his role in this life. Jesus does tell his own story here, but it does not develop into a cosmic history. Instead, Tunström writes a narrative that describes Jesus’ inner struggle and growth into independence.¹⁵ In these novels, additional information is available, and the reader is given an insider’s perspective into the life of Jesus.

Saramago’s narrator is something of a mystery. Above all, (s)he is an ominscient figure who does not essentially differ from an implied author. (S)he even discusses literary critics and their rules of narration and plays with these in his story. In this connection (s)he admits that the present narrator is a liar: They also claim this is the narrative process which best serves the ever desirable effect of verisimilitude, for if the episode imagined and described is not and is never likely to become or supplant factual reality, then there must be at least some similitude. Not as in the present narrative, in which the reader’s credence has clearly been put to the test . . .¹⁶ The narrator is above both God and the Devil, obviously, as (s)he knows everything that concerns their relationship. This may have interesting implications for the interpretation of the work, and we will return to these issues at the end of the investigation.

Moreover, in this analysis, I have chosen to speak practically and simply of the author and his or her readers. Only in passages where it seems necessary will I briefly discuss the role of the implied author. In the present study, however, this does not mean that I hold the real authors personally responsible for the ideological or religious views that appear in the novels. My assessment concerns the particular novels themselves.

At this point, it is necessary to discuss the nature of historical novels briefly. Jesus-novels from the end of the twentieth century are no longer typical historiographies. Some of the earlier novels, investigated by Theodore Ziolkowski, were quite clearly traditional rewritings of the Gospels. Their purpose was, for instance, to clarify and to illuminate the content of the Bible for a modern reader. They expanded the stories and made them understandable for the modern reader. The factual knowledge of history varies from novel to novel, though. This holds true also in the more recent books. It is naturally tempting for the reader of a Jesus-novel to make his judgment merely by making a comparison with the famous source text. In this case the reader’s notions about the novel are mainly reflections against the background of the world of the Bible. This has been noted for instance by the Finnish author and scholar Markku Envall.

A historical novel about Jesus, as a genre, is rather problematic. . . . Its most important source text is well known by the readers, and it has a canonical status in the religious community. Problems culminate when Jesus’ speeches are rewritten. If the speeches are simply repeated in the same form as given by the Gospel writer, one wonders why a new book should be written to accompany them. If Jesus’ words are changed in order to support some special interpretation or view, the writer drifts into the area of exegesis. In this case the credentials of the novelist are not worth much. . . . In every case a historical novel about Jesus is an attempt to improve the original source, which, to the misfortune of the writer, in its own genre is anything but poor.¹⁷

As long as one thinks that the value of a historical novel should be assessed from the point of view of historical accuracy, Envall’s comments are proper. There are, no doubt, several Jesus-novels that attempt to exploit detailed historical information in their presentation. Among these books are, for instance, Lewis Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880) and Robert Graves’s King Jesus (1946). In Finnish literature the many novels by Tatu Vaaskivi and Mika Waltari belong to this tradition.¹⁸ In these works the atmosphere of the New Testament is being sought in the manner Envall describes above. Ziolkowski calls such novels fictionalizing biographies. They may have been written in the manner of ancient apocryphal writings about Jesus’ youth, or they can simply be rewritings of the canonical Gospels.¹⁹

There are several methodological questions here that need to be addressed. Historiography, in literature, is not merely a question of rewriting or rewording history as it really happened. As Markku Ihonen has noted, there are two different readings of a historical novel. On the one hand, it can be read merely as a description of history. In this case the reader uses his own knowledge of history and sources and compares the novel with this information. On the other hand, the novel can always be read merely as fiction. In this case the reader ignores his previous knowledge about the characters or the events they are engaged in, apart from the information given in the text.²⁰

The distinction is necessary because fictionality cannot merely be a matter of expressions. Certain passages can be read both as historical statements when they appear in a historical context, and as historical fiction when they are a part of a fictional story with an individual purpose and particular orientation. Fiction, even historiographical fiction, is mainly a world the author creates. The past is past also for a historian, and all explanations of history depend on construction and interpretation. But the past for an author is a fictional past and is more open to interpretation and reinterpretation than the work of a historian. Nevertheless, if an author chooses a historical subject, he must have a reason. It stands to reason that this is the case especially with the new gospels we call Jesus-novels.

These novels are usually connected with real history through historical characters in the story. This must not mislead one to think that the characters themselves were real people—and this caveat extends even to the Jesus-figure of the novels. The novels produce an illusion of reality precisely with the help of such characters and alleged events. One could call the characters of historical novels fictionalisings. They are not completely fictional creations but in the context of the narrative they are creatures of the artist. They serve the aims of the fictional work functionally. In historical study people refer directly to reality, while in fiction they refer to reality indirectly via fictionalisings.²¹ There is no narrative without a rhetorical discourse. The narrative itself does not derive from history. Hence the characters in the narrative cannot simply be identified with persons known from history. We have knowledge of an event described in a historical novel merely as rhetorical discourse.

Such a distinction essentially alters the traditional definition of the nature of historical novel. In his famous book The Forms of Historical Fiction, Harry Shaw, a well-known Walter Scott scholar, still assumes that in a historical novel the author can accurately describe facts of history.²² He uses terms such as fictional probability.²³ It is true, of course, that in several historical novels one can find an intentional approach where the author aims at historical accuracy. However, historical novels usually differ from scholarly history owing either to artistic intentions or ideological presuppositions. In this sense there is a clear difference between a history book and a fictional novel. The critical discussion about the nature of historical novel has changed the general view about the historical approach in these same writings. In Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism Shaw reminds us that the otherness of historical situations and cultural differences change the whole question concerning history. Therefore, in the study of historical novels we are dealing also with the intellectual problems of our own time.²⁴

According to some scholars, the new change is typical of postmodern literature. It has been defined as essentially self-reflexive. Postmodern literature no longer represents the external world. Instead, it tends to explore it own literary conventions. Therefore, postmodern literature suggests alternate histories. As Elisabeth Wesseling notes:

Postmodernist novelists do not straightforwardly project inspiring alternatives for the status quo into the future. Rather, they turn to the past in order to look for unrealized possibilities that inhered in historical situations, and subsequently imagine what history would have looked like if unrealized sequences of events and courses of action had come about. This results in the invention of alternate histories which evidently have never taken place and therefore cannot lay any claim to historical truth, but which may perhaps come true at some point in the future as the return of the repressed.²⁵

Such a notion may help the assessment of recent Jesus-novels, even though one needs to remember that they cannot be defined simply as postmodern novels. What is evident, however, is that it leads to new questions.

As the contrasts between ancient texts and the modern novel have shown, both readers and scholars need to address two more issues. Firstly, one needs to investigate how the story actually differs from general history. Secondly, one needs to ask what the author’s reinterpretive aim is. These are the standard questions within intertextual investigation. Therefore, the theory of intertextuality is of utmost importance in the present study. Questions concerning methodology will be discussed later in a chapter of their own.²⁶

The present study’s interest lies in the polarisation between the canonical Gospels and recent Jesus-novels, or between Christianity and the ideology behind the new narrative. The focus is on the process of adaptation. Hence, an element alien to simple historical accuracy is assumed to affect the descriptions of the novels from the very start. Moreover, one can state that already a generation ago the age of robust historicism was replaced by postmodern readings. Now scholars recognise that previous approaches to history have been insensitive to the biased nature of their sources. For instance, feminist readings and gender criticism have altered even the epistemology of literary criticism.

Therefore, suffice it to say that when answering the first methodological question concerning the nature of historiography one needs to distinguish between reading as history and reading as fiction. Writing a historiography means reinterpretation of previous documents and, thus, also Jesus-novels can be read as constructions rather than reconstructions. They represent fictionalising. As mentioned above, however, I will deal more with this and other methodological issues such as the nature of rewriting and the role of ideologies and ethical readings in the following chapter.

The adaptation and appropriation of Gospel narratives in contrast-novels is based on an idea of discontinuity. In polarised Jesus-novels the contradiction is obvious and even surprising. Provocative descriptions and expressions aim at shaking conventional convictions about religion. In the Western history of ideas there is one source that explains the emergence of such an approach. I will argue that these novels are related to Nietzsche’s ideology and his early idea of a clash of cultures: Jewish-Christian biblical tradition colliding with the enlightened humanism of modern scientific society. This is why the present treatise will focus particularly on Nietzschean themes in the novels. The decision to choose Nietzsche as a point of departure will be explained in detail below (in section 4) but even here it can be said that a hypothesis of Nietzschean influence covers the essential intentions of the investigated novels well.

The aim of this dissertation, therefore, is to analyse adaptation and appropriation in late twentieth-century Jesus-novels. I will investigate how these novels quote and use New Testament passages, and why they leave out others. Therefore, the focus of the investigation is, first of all, in the treatment of the original source text and its reduction to a smaller collection of passages. The Bible as a source text is so influential and deeply rooted in Western cultural history that any novel’s relation to it is inevitably interesting. Secondly, what is more important still, one needs to analyse the deliberate changes these novels make in their adaptation. They select their material very carefully and place it in a new context. Furthermore, they present an intertextual change that is loaded and intentional. It is motivated by an ideological turn that, in most cases, opposes the doctrines of the canonical text. Since the Second World War different philosophical traditions have attempted to tear down and replace previous Western metanarratives, Christianity being probably the most prominent of these. This is why the themes appearing in these novels, as the present hypothesis states, have a Nietzschean tone, leading recent Jesus-novels to contest the so-called Christian slave morality and even to proclaim a death-of-God ideology. Therefore, the chapters of this study will be defined in terms of different themes in Nietzsche’s atheist philosophy. Such an investigation cannot help being interdisciplinary. In addition to intertextual analysis one needs to be aware of both theological and philosophical elements that affect the writing of the corpus novels.

With this point of departure certain other books also need to be mentioned here. Albert Camus has a prominent place among fiction writers discussing Christian tradition in the spirit of Nietzsche. His essays in the book The Rebel will be of substantial help in this study and will be compared with the Jesus-novels in question.²⁷ In assessing different feminist Jesus-novels, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s monograph In Memory of Her plays a significant role, as does Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, both of which lay the groundwork for a feminist treatment of the New Testament.²⁸ In addition, several monographs on death-of-God theology will be discussed during the investigation, and they will be introduced in their proper context.

What is special for the Jesus-novels treated in the present study is that the polarisation they pose in relation to the source text is very harsh. The figure of Jesus is altered almost beyond recognition. The Christian message is either changed completely or turned into another religion—or even a version of secularism. Traditional Christian views are contested through the development of the story itself. All this betrays the Nietzschean attitude towards the canonical Gospels.

2. Investigating Rewritten Gospels

The novels investigated in this study have been written during a period that actively dealt with the painful memories of the two World Wars and especially the horrors of the Nazi regime in Germany. Many of the books are reactive and attempt to cope with the inexplicable violence suffered by the previous generation. In both literature and philosophy this is a time when truth is questioned, meaning is dismantled, and metanarratives die. In theology too despair prevails and the status of the biblical God is threatened. Therefore, it is only to be expected that the intertextual rewriting of the canonical Gospels, which at least some of the Jesus-novels represent, also questions the Christian tradition and biblical truth. According to Ron Rosenbaum, Norman Mailer has claimed that Holocaust agony has been the most fundamental idea of his career.

It’s often forgotten that Mr. Mailer was one of the first non-theologians to speculate about the unconscious cultural impact of the Holocaust in the 50’s. The first sentence of his controversial essay The White Negro declared: Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps . . . upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive . . . in these years.²⁹

The cultural angst of the West evidently affects the authors, at least in a general sense on the level of the unconscious mind. This is also what separates many recent novels from earlier rewritings of the Gospels. In Jesus through the Centuries (1985), Jaroslav Pelikan investigates descriptions of Jesus in general literature from earlier centuries and encounters another kind of literary world.³⁰ The same is mostly true for the only particular monograph there is in English on Jesus-novels and the appearance of the figure of Jesus in literature, Theodore Ziolkowski’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972). He studies especially the period of rationalism and its later developments, and in the novels he analyses Jesus remains a positive figure. Ziolkowski focuses on different transfigurations, though. Therefore, the subjects and persons appearing in the investigated novels are usually not directly related to Jesus and his disciples. Ziolkowski is interested in Jesus-figures who have been transferred to new contexts. Historical Jesus-novels are in fact neglected in his analysis.³¹

There are also other kinds of analyses of Jesus-literature. Wesley Kort treats religious meanings present in literature in his Narrative Elements and Religious Meanings (1975). Kort’s analysis remains on a quite general level. Northrop Frye is more detailed in his study in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982). Frye, however, has turned the approach into its opposite and writes a study of the Bible from the point of view of a literary critic. He comments on the biblical text with the help of later writings, not the other way round.³² Hence, earlier analyses of Jesus-novels have little to contribute to the investigation of recent rewritings.

As regards the investigation of particular novels, the situation is different. Contrast-novels with their challenging attitude have been analysed in several distinguished articles. Helena Kaufman interprets Saramago’s Gospel as a postmodern rewriting and Teresa Cristina Cerdeira da Silva attends to the ironic dialogue between the novel and the New Testament.³³ Ilan Stavans analyses the humanisation of the Jesus-figure, Douwe Fokkema studies the nature of such a reversal, and Harold Bloom explains this change by Saramago’s intended questioning of the traditional values of writing history.³⁴ Ziva Ben-Porat calls this change prototypical rewriting, and Francisco Peña Fernández calls it inverse intertextuality.³⁵ Saramago’s aims and real object have also been discussed in detail. David Frier suggests that Saramago is not primarily attacking Christian doctrines but the history of the Catholic Church instead. Other scholars, however, like Fokkema, assume that Saramago constructs a polarisation between Christian doctrines and his own views.³⁶

Mailer in his Gospel According to the Son has often irritated his readers by either his ideas or the quality of his expression and poetry, but scholars are divided in their conclusions. Some sardonic critics hold that Mailer in his Gospel of Norman just copies New Testament ideas in order to do away with their content: By now, though, the idea of presenting Jesus as fallible, even a sexual, human being is a little old hat, and Mailer’s book will probably induce not outrage so much as mild amusement that the old man is up to his antics again.³⁷ Furthermore, Wood states that the very melody of the book is foolish.³⁸ And finally, as Gordon remarks, we encounter the problem of bad poetry: Most of these faults are failures of voice.³⁹

There are others, however, who present Mailer as an ideologue and assume that in his novel he has offered readers a strict critique of the Christian tradition. Ron Rosenbaum speaks of Mailer’s post-holocaust theodicy, and Brian McDonald concludes that Mailer, who is interested in the problem of evil, persistently deals with this issue in this novel.⁴⁰ One can then assume that if the essentially Jewish problem of theodicy really is the most fundamental idea of Mailer’s works it must be a burning issue also in his most straightforward book on God and Jesus’ message.

What unites all these assessments of different novels is their focusing on the method of reversal. The investigated novels are considered inversive and often hostile in their intertextual rewriting. Such a result confirms the present analysis’s point of departure. Not many scholars have suggested that such a polarisation would have a larger cultural motivation, however. The present work will claim that the opposition these novels adopt is the inheritance of Nietzschean thinking. The inversive rewriting resuscitates an opposition towards the ostensible Christian slave morality and a false view of God.

Hence, recent Jesus-novels do not simply repeat and paraphrase. Instead, in their adaptation, they replace previous strategies by revising, dissolving, and even perverting the source text. Therefore, the methodological discussion must include approaches that are able to treat the processes of producing narratives and narrating history. Following Linda Hutcheon, one could state that historiographies, as descriptions of the past and interpretations of events, are ideological constructions. They are statements the coherence of which is being produced by a common system of signs that is significant in a certain cultural context. Both history and fiction are cultural sign systems, ideological construction whose ideology includes their appearance of being autonomous and self-contained.⁴¹

Hutcheon, of course, is an expert on postmodern investigation, and this is the reason why she holds that postmodernity keeps reworking the past. One can extend this insight to recent Jesus-novels, saying that a key term in that line of fiction is the presence of the past. This does not result in a resuscitation of previous historiographic approaches. The past is not present as such. Instead, its presence is represented by a second thought, a critical position, ironical dialogue, all of which produce a parody of history. This explains why irony has become so popular: Herein lies the governing role of irony in postmodernism.⁴² On these grounds Hutcheon concludes that historiography in literature is metafiction, where consciousness about history is presented as a rethinking of historical events and persons.

Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.⁴³

Jesus-novels often take this metafictional strategy one step further. Since they are stories describing ancient times, they read history backwards, in which case one can speak of the presence of the future. The New Testament is rewritten by constructing the new narrative in a critical and sometimes ironical dialogue with the realised history of the Christian church.

Several recent Jesus-novels fall into the category of historiographic metafiction and represent a thorough reworking of the original text as well as the whole phenomenon of Christianity. Therefore, one can learn from Hutcheon’s description of postmodern historiography. On the one hand, her conception of metafiction can easily be applied to the study of certain Jesus-novels which aim at a deconstruction of traditional religious hierarchies. On the other hand, Hutcheon herself has adopted an ideological stance in her approach. She maintains that this is not merely a tool for the analysis of literature but rather a matter of philosophy of science. Metafiction is a tool for the investigation of history as such.⁴⁴

Speaking about postmodernism is no longer without risk in literary scholarship, though. The entire trend has been questioned—and usually with good reason, at least as long as philosophy is involved. Scholars joke about writers playing post-games and committing acts of irresponsible deconstruction. It is not, however, a matter of asking whether there is such a phenomenon as postmodernism. Instead one should pay attention to the fact that both in literature itself and in literary criticism ethical reading has become a new standard, which is represented in the Methodenlehre by strictly defined approaches. The basic Selden–Widdowson–Brooker’s guide, for instance, introduces feminist theories, as well as poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and gay theories without hesitation.⁴⁵ The alleged postmodern, if you will, is precisely what novels bearing these intentions appear to be, even though the phenomenon itself might today be better called ethical reading.

3. Ethical Reading and Ethical Readings

There is a moralistic tone in many of the investigated Jesus-novels. The general descriptions of these books, quoted in the previous section, already prove that they challenge certain Christian beliefs and doctrines on ethical grounds. Some Jesus-novels present themselves almost as apologies for the oppressed and those discriminated against. These novels oppose the rich and the beautiful, and the patriarchal apostolic church allied with power and the leaders of society. Should one then, on these grounds, understand Jesus-novels particularly as ethical readings of Christianity? This is not only possible but probable. According to these novels, as will soon become apparent, biblical views are to be considered unhealthy for human beings. The novels often represent kind of normative readings and reworkings of the canonical text since their revision is based on new values. Their intertextual transformation is, even from the outset, quite negative. This is evident even before entering into any detailed investigation. In this particular respect these novels may be called ethical readings. But if this is true and if the readings appear to be normative according to postmodernism, should the assessment of such novels be normative, as well? There are several problems in the theory of intertextual analysis, and the question of the ethics of reading is undoubtedly one of them.

Compared with previous Jesus-novels investigated by Ziolkowski, the normative reading is what is new in these books. Recent novels adopt values that differ from those of the Christian tradition. Therefore, certain philosophical points of departure need to be discussed before deciding about the nature of ethical readings. This leads us to the philosophical discussion of the late twentieth century. Theoretical problems concerning postmodernism focus on poststructuralist epistemology and its conception of truth. Moving beyond its phenomenological roots, poststructuralism has questioned both the possibility to reach beyond a phenomenon and the existence of the transcendental signified.⁴⁶ In a philosophical sense, this resulted in relativism where meaning was held dependent on language games, and truth became an aspect of a particular discourse. These views were also largely used in literary criticism.⁴⁷

The theoretical problem lies in the fact that neither Nietzsche’s Christian slave morality critique nor the poststructuralist challenging of metanarratives was ever really based on relativism. Instead, already in the 1960s and 1970s previous metanarratives were rejected in the name of higher values. Postmodernism has always been a moralistic movement. In the age of the new revolution different ideologies struggled over intellectual values. There is no longer room here for the traditional class struggle. As Lyotard maintained, it was a struggle over definitions of knowledge: "To speak is to